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Before you hire a professional freelance writer, you want to know the writer’s experience, rates, process, and reputation. But as a professional freelance writer, I also need to know five things about you:

1. Your deadline. I want to complete your marketing or technical writing project on time–even ahead of time–but that necessitates knowing your deadline. If your deadline isn’t realistic, I’ll let you know up front. If it is flexible, I’ll provide a ballpark on when to expect a first draft or finished project.

2. Your audience. What audience are you are trying to reach with your blog, website, success story, brochure, proposal, or user manual? “Everyone” is not an answer. Your audience will differ in their knowledge, problems, resources, and so on. How will you reach them? I may have suggestions for building an audience or selecting the most efficient marketing approach.

3. Your process. Will you correspond best by email, phone, or Skype? How easy will it be to connect with the people you want me to interview? How open will you be with information? Will your reviewers start editing each other’s edits? What is your approval process?

4. Your budget. I’m not asking because I want to gouge you; I’m asking because I don’t want either of us to have a surprise at the end. I’m happy to give you estimates on the basis you prefer: project, per page, hourly.

5. Your goal. Are you trying to educate, entertain, or inform your audience? Do you intend to follow up with them or do you expect them to contact you? Where does this project fit in your overall marketing plan? Would you be open to suggestions on how to meet your goal?

If you know your deadlines, audience, process, budget, and goal, you are ready to speak to a freelance writer. If you don’t, at TWP Marketing & Technical Communications, we have years of experience in helping companies just like yours figure out a solution that meets or exceeds your expectations.

You have a high-tech product that you’re marketing to high-tech customers. So to convince those customers that this product is truly amazing, you use complicated sentences, multi-syllable words, acronyms and jargon–and you lose them.

No matter how informed your audience or how well educated, if your product is new to them, they are beginners. They need a slow introduction that focuses, not on the technology, but on the problem that technology solves, especially if it solves the problem faster, cheaper, more reliably and more easily.

Improving Technical Marketing: Simplify Your Message

For example, take this 47-word sentence: “Our product avoids the traditional approach of splitting up the DCS and power distribution system into numerous sub-contracts, which is not an optimal solution because the operating company has to operate, maintain and periodically evaluate a multitude of disparate products and subsystems over the project’s life-cycle.”

In that sentence, a very simple concept (basically, “too many cooks spoil the stew”) has been made difficult and obscure.

My suggested rewrite is 11 words shorter and a lot clearer: “Traditionally, the distributed control and power distribution systems are made up of products and subsystems from many different subcontractors. Operating, maintaining and evaluating all those different subsystems is difficult. Our product provides an efficient and cost-effective solution.”

Improving Technical Marketing: Know Your Audience

As mentioned in the introduction to this post, your customers are novices when it comes to your new product, even if they are highly experienced and educated in your field. But your customers may also be divided into end users and financial decision makers. Your end users may understand the value of your product faster and more enthusiastically than the financial decision makers.

Therefore, your technical marketing should address the concerns of both end users and financial decision makers. Research has shown that most readers can absorb at best 5 new ideas at one time. You want to keep your opening message well under that limit. Focus on no more than 3 benefits of the product, including the problem it solves for the end user and its return on investment (in productivity, increased revenue, efficiency and so on).

Remember the show “What Not to Wear”? The hosts rescued badly dressed women mostly by stressing simple outfits that brought out the women’s innate sense of style and gave them confidence. Sometimes as a writer I find myself in a similar situation. My clients have marketing materials that are confused about audience, mission and even the power of words. My job is to find the clear, accurate, passionate message (the style) beneath the confusion so that clients feel good about their marketing materials–and so do customers.

Confusion over the audience. A local nonprofit’s website switched back and forth between addressing the people they were trying to help and addressing potential donors. As a result, on the home page, people they were helping became “you” part of the time and “they” the rest of the time. No one looking wants to be categorized as one of “them.” When you know your audience, your writing has the power to move people, whether to seek your help, buy your product or donate to your cause.

Confusion over the mission. One of my clients was transitioning between two main products. As a result, their website had become a roiling sea of information with no true focal point. Visitors to the website didn’t know where to look first and wondered if they had found the best company to meet their needs. You have to be committed to your own mission before you can convince customers to buy into it.

Confusion over the power of words. More words and longer words don’t equal more power. I like to use the example of two salespeople. One says, “Our professionally engineered, state-of-the-art product has the incredible capability of significantly reducing your annualized monetary outflow” and the other says, “Our product saves you money year after year.” A simple, clear statement that you believe in carries more weight than any string of five syllable adjectives.

At TWP Marketing & Technical Communications, we believe in the power of clarity, accuracy and passion. Let us bring those three elements into your marketing materials and enable your message to shine. Contact us today.